In the same way that their incompetence has been very slow to move the needle, once they lose the market it’s going to be almost impossible to get it back.
As for Linux, I keep waiting for the return of netbooks wave, in something that isn't a constrained Chromebook or Android tablet with keyboard.
Ordinary people buy what they can see on the local PC stores, not buy over Internet, importing System 76 and similar.
For everything more than that: the Macbook Air is equivalent or cheaper.
People seem to continue the lie that Apple hardware is more expensive, yet I just closed a deal on a business thinkpad (T14s Gen6) which was double the price and 2/3rds as performant, because we're a Windows shop and we don't buy Apple. Forgive my annoyance here but someone told me that "at least we don't buy expensive Macs" after we signed the invoice and it really got under my skin because it's legitimately half the price for more power. Completely blinded by ignorance.
Upgrades might be expensive, sure, but anything of any quality has always been like-for-like with Apple being cheaper on the low-spec end.
The consumer grade market where Windows used to dominate is having their lunch totally stolen by Chromebooks and Android Tablets. (More-so by Tablets I would argue).
We don't lie, we don't live in US, with US salaries, some European countries still get 800 euros as average salary, not to mention all the other even more poorer regions around the globe.
I’m talking about the Swedish perspective.
Although the same is true in the UK. So which Europe are we talking about?
Kids get Chromebooks in school, most people seem to be content with a tablet. I have a hard time finding anyone who has a laptop <8 years old now (that isn't a company laptop).
my thinkpad was around 20,000 Swedish krona
Not quite ThinkPad level, but the keyboard, pad, screen etc are very good and it runs Linux well.
And the Steam Deck is clearly that. I’d happily recommend the deck to normal non tech users. It’s just that good. One of the things I think they did exceptionally well is using a read only image based OS, meaning the system is always in a known state, and if an update ever breaks something, the bootloader shows the previous working images letting you boot back in to those and wait for the broken update to be yanked and replaced. You never need the user to reinstall after a broken OS.
It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".
But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.
* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.
A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.
The only person who would say otherwise has clearly never written anything on that level on Windows. It's not just uneasy: it's Sisyphean. The code-signing signature you need alone is an order of magnitude more difficult to obtain than the development burden of an appropriately defensive kernel module.
We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
For now.
That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.
> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.
Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.
> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.
It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.
There is a lot of signed malware for Windows.
You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.
Conversely, 15 minutes to install, fully patched, and ready to go Linux distro is a hugely attractive alternative to Windows. There are 3 viable gaming distros, and the underlying tech continues to evolve. It is already invisible to most games.
There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.
Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.
I don't think anyone else does.
There isn't any technical reasons preventing it, PS5's are based on a heavily modified BSD - it requires a single vendor to standardise and support the platform with enough resources/commitment to do it properly.
And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.
The reasons are:
* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible). * Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to. * Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.
The upside is that MS has the reserves and fallbacks to get their shit together if they realized that they are faced with a bad sitation and those that can't leave will get better products.
The question is what can obviate Excel.
No one is using products from Microsoft due to their quality.